Contest January 2021 CaC: New Year, New Type (Results Up!)

[ShinxieDim]

My idea sounded great on paper, I guess I didn't really think it through a whole lot though. Good work everyone, looking forward to next time!

 

[Falling Skies]

Ah, I didn't find either the Froslass or the Rhyperior. I'll take the loss of points on those ones. I did find Falinks and modified its wording to be grammatically correct, as Falinks counts then individually whereas Basculin would interact with all 1-3 at once, but as there's no precedent for it I can't really argue it, and the extra point wouldn't matter anyway so it's a moot point. Second is fine.

This was a fun theme. I really enjoyed seeing which Pokemon everyone came up with, and why they were typed the way they were. I personally loved the Dark-type Hypno a lot, as while as the Psychic-typed legendary beasts card.

Thanks for hosting, I look forward to next month's.

 

[The Last Shaymin]

Either way, I think there’s a pretty significant design flaw. With the former, it’s always dangerous to balance a card with the mindset of “it’s flippy, so I can make it do a ton of damage.” Variance, including coin flips, is a valid balancing tool, but it’s only fun as long as the player has some level of control over it. With Super Scoop Up or Crushing Hammer, for example, you can play four of them to maximize your odds of hitting it when it matters. With lots of coin flip effects on attacks, you have options like Victini GRI or Trick Coin to turn the odds more in your favor. But attacking through Confusion, especially with a high-risk-high-reward attack like Improbable Calculations (210 for 1!), is no fun. Either you’ve done a huge amount of cheap damage, or you’ve thrown away your turn, and very few people are gonna be happy making that call.

The idea I had here was that you could either shut off the ability and lose the immunity, or you could keep your immunity to heavy Pokemon and flip a coin. It's not exactly throwing away your turn, as they can't hit you next turn unless they can, in which case the card doesn't really work.

Anyway I learned a bunch from this, thanks for everything!

This isn't counted in the scores (not that it matters because it wouldn't have hit top 3). I'm just salty that he switched after I'd already judged his card.


So here we have a gimmick card in the same vein as Ultra Necrozma, as you mentioned. Tricky Trap is kinda interesting, but there aren't a lot of commonly used Pokemon with a Retreat Cost of 3 or more, so it becomes fairly hard to stall with. However, locking yourself out of attacking if you alter your own Retreat Cost at all makes me want to throw this card back in the binder. Unlike Ultra Necrozma, who can actually attack with no restrictions during the late game (as intended), the Porygon-Z player is forced to find some way to shut Tricky Trap off in order to get any damage out of Porygon-Z at all. While you can utilize Garbodor and Float Stone, like you said, a gimmick should be able to function on its own merits. Wacky Withdrawal does 10 damage if you don't alter Porygon-Z's Retreat Cost and that's not feasible.

Stage 2s are notoriously difficult to get into play, and as a Stage 2 that requires an unrelated Stage 1 and two Tools to function properly, you won't be streaming attacks with this any time soon. I feel the deck has too many moving parts to be anything near consistent.

Wording errors:
General
In the SSH era, Psychic Pokemon should have Darkness Weakness and a -30 Fighting Resistance. Reimagining a Pokemon as a new type means factoring in that new type's Weaknesses and Resistances (if any) as well, not just slapping a new card color on an existing Pokemon. [-2 points]
Evolves from Porygon2 should be capitalized. [-1 point]
Evolves from Porygon2, not Porygon-2 [-1 point]
Tricky Trap
- The general wording of the Ability could probably be a little cleaner, but with no existing reference for cards that compare each other's Retreat Costs, my hands are tied. [-0 points]
- The Ability should read, "...that Pokémon can't attack." (Lucario VIV) [-1 point]
- The Ability should read, "...this Pokémon can't attack." (Lucario VIV) [-1 point]

Creativity/Originality: 14/20
(I liked the idea, but the execution was a bit poor. It can't stand on its own and requires too much support to go anywhere.)
Wording: 9/15
(Be more careful next time.)
Believability/Playability: 8/15
(This sort of joke flavor text wouldn't appear on a card. This card is also highly underpowered and should have some way to make it feasibly self-sufficient.)
Total: 31/50

I didn't expect to actually get this card graded from you, lol
Like I mentioned, I think this version of the card is better as a stall card. It wasn't entirely meant to attack, but it had the option to if you used garbodor. I think it is important to remember that in expanded, setting up multiple pokemon isn't that difficult, as we have mysterious treasure, lele, and brigette. The consistency of expanded actually lets you get a garb and a porygon set up not too difficultly, and i think in standard the card should take a more stall based route with tool scrappers, multiple porygons, chaotic swells, and etc. Remember that the best decks in standard are all based around Vmax Pokemon, which have a retreat cost of around 3 usually. This means that you can attach an air balloon and the opponen't can't really do anything. Centi Vmax, for example, doesn't have any alternate attackers whatsoever in the jirachi version other than eldegoss, which is basically a meme and it would be very difficult to chain it. with decks such as ADPZ, if you can just discard all their air balloon (they usually run 2) you can just win by deckout. It's not very good, by all means, but against an unteched deck it can jank out games by stalling, and because it's a single prizer you can get out around 6 in a game, and you can use lana's fishing rod to get back the air balloon.

Also, you must have graded my unedited version. I fixed the joke flavor text and added the confusion clause but it's fine, I didn't expect you to grade it either way lol

 

[Pone]

hhhhhh Yissss perfect creativity! That's really all I was aiming for here. 50 would have been nice but I realized not long after posting that that ability actually can get kinda broken. I couldn't decide if the score was going to drop enough for an edit to be worth it so I left it, but yeah I totally agree it should exclude Shuckle. I'm a real stickler for sticking to video game mechanics where possible, though, so idk if I'm totally on board with the official retreat costs for Shuckle yet. Either way I'm actually totally thrilled with my results and I look forward to seeing if I can top myself in the future! I feel proud to be the only one to have two perfect creativity scores since the CaC reboot. :3

Also you definitely don't have to worry about excessively long notes after this haha. No way I could sustain doing that even one more time. This does mark a turning point I think. I want to start getting in with shorter notes in general than I have for all my previous CaCs. You're right that a card should be able to speak for itself and that's another place I wouldn't mind challenging myself in.

That all aside, congrats PMJ! That's some seriously impressive scores you got there!

 

[Mr. Melon]

It's really nice to get some semi-professional feedback on my card design. I definitely deserved the lower originality score, as a Dark Hypno is pretty vanilla and the attack was fairly uninspired. I actually completely missed Sleep!, which would likely be in the same era as a strictly worse card. I agree with the philosophy around there being no danger in opening Hypno, but my main idea with this card was to improve Sleep, as it seems to be rather underpowered compared to the likes of Paralysis. I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out, and I'm glad you liked it. I look forward to the next CaC!